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WAP vs. iMode - The Big Cell Fight
har124 writes: "With DoCoMo's decision to take its i-Mode phones, which are hugely popular in Japan, to the U.S. and Europe, the big fight between i-Mode and WAP seems to have begun. Who'll emerge from this bloody brawl? Check out the discussion."
I work for an internet company and we are currently working on a project to make our site WAP enabled. WHy are we using WAP, cause we have to. If we had a choice we would use I-Mode for several reasons.
1. WAP really isn't documented anywhere of what acutally works and what doesn't. Not to mention that every phone maker out there is using something different, It isn't really WAP, it is the bastard first child of what will become WAP in the next 6 months. There is limited support for full form functionality. And the emulators don't work consistently, thus, the phones don't work consistently, get my drift. For the Mr Rodger's neighborhood people," Can you say Cluster F*CK!"
2. Speed burns baby! WAP, at best can handle 9600. Whoo! now that is a screaming technology. But that is what it was built for, recieving text, not graphics, not games, text. I-mode however has been built for speed. In Japan they are playing network games over these things.
3. When WAP decided to come out, it thought, hell, we don't need no stinking http protocol, we will invent our own called WAP. yeah, great idea guys, did you forget to mention that you are re-inventing the wheel here or were we supposed to see something great and new. Basically they made a system where the phone contacts the provider which has a server, the server goes out to the site that they want and looks for WML files, the server crunches them and then sends them back to the phone. (at least, that is the way that it is supposed to work, I haven't had anyone prove that it works yet) This is really great, so this is basically a proxy server going to a web server and delivering a page that they can see on thier phone. Why not just use the TCP/IP and go hit a web page designed for a phone. If a server is set up correctly and the programmer has a clue, they will do some client checking and send the phones to a greatly stripped down page were all they see is the text, nothing fancy.
The japanese have thier stuff together, the question is, are we going to open our eyes and see it or are we going to get stomped in electronics.....again!